Monday 30 July 2007

Mac on SBS - Excel:Mac and Excel Windows Inconsistencies

We are in the process of putting together the final draft of a set of technical assessment forms that we will be using for client's job candidates.

The forms are in Excel. They were created in Excel on Windows.

When we create forms in Excel, we always set the column width to 1 for enough columns to hit the .25" margins across the page. We modify it accordingly for forms that need to have .5" margins.

This gives us the flexibility to create forms with fields that are not restricted in their placement because of one big column. If the form is for print only, we don't bother merging the respective fields. If the form is for live data input via a laptop, then the respective cells will be merged and the range labeled.

When we open this particular form in Excel:Mac, we end up with the form being 4 columns (4 points) too wide. The margins and page size are identical on both the Mac and Windows PC. But, something within the Mac version of Excel says the number of columns is too many to fit on the page.

To make it work in Excel:Mac, we have to scale the "Adjust to" 94% in the page setup, and define a page break between the two pages.

They sit side by side, so the page break goes on the left boundary column on the page that sits to the right.

This was definitely unexpected, as we have been working with Word documents back and forth between the Mac and Windows platforms with no issues so far other than constraining Office 2007 to save in the legacy non-XML format.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have had the same problem with excel. When I created my spreadsheet on my Mac, it was an extra page longer, and one of the columns was on a page to the right. This was irritating, but I fixed it. When the file came back to the Mac, it was all screwed up again. I dont see why the Mac and pc version would be any different.